Clara slipped out of the uniform, quickly pulling his black silk shirt over her shoulders. It was huge on her, falling to mid-thigh, smelling of bergamot, tobacco, and him.
She rolled the sleeves and tied the bottom at her waist.
When she walked over to the coffee table, Alexander turned.
His breath hitched.
For a second, the cold, controlled mafia boss looked at her not as an asset, not as a maid, not as a risk.
As a woman.
“Better,” he murmured.
His voice was thick with something he was trying to conceal.
Clara sat beside him on the velvet sofa and pulled the leather-bound ledger into her lap. She opened it, scanning the chaotic sketches, number strings, and strange celestial charts her father had drawn.
Work.
She needed work.
Something stable to hold onto before Alexander’s proximity made her forget exactly how dangerous he was.
“It’s not a standard cipher,” she said, focusing on the pages. “Falcone thought my father was designing a vault. But my father was building a map.”
Alexander leaned closer.
His shoulder brushed hers.
“Look at the gear ratios,” Clara said, pointing to a sketch of interlocking cogs. “These aren’t dimensions for a lock. They’re coordinates. Latitude and longitude disguised as mechanical tolerances.”
“Can you translate it?”
“Yes,” Clara said. “But it will take time. And knowing Falcone, wherever he’s keeping my father will be rigged with something worse than thermite. If we breach it, he’ll have a kill switch. He’ll execute my father before we can get him out.”
“Then we don’t breach it from the outside,” Alexander said.
Clara looked at him.
“How?”
“We go through the front door.”
Her brow furrowed.
“Dominic Falcone is hosting an underground gala next week at Cipriani Wall Street,” Alexander explained. “It’s a front. He uses the event to physically launder bearer bonds through his elite network. The vault holding your father is directly beneath the venue. I have an invitation, but I cannot walk into that vault alone.”
He reached out and cupped her jaw.
The touch ignited every nerve in her body.
“I need you, Clara,” he admitted.
For a man like him, those words sounded foreign.
Dangerous.
“I need your mind to navigate the locks. And you need my army to put Dominic Falcone in the ground. I am proposing an alliance.”
Clara stared into his gray eyes.
She saw violence there.
Danger.
Blood.
The kind of man mothers warned daughters about.
But she also saw absolute loyalty once given.
He was offering her the one thing she had spent five years chasing.
A chance to save her father.
A chance to stop hiding.
A chance to stop being invisible.
“If I do this,” Clara whispered, “if I walk into the fire with you, what happens when the ash settles?”
Alexander leaned in.
His lips hovered close enough to make the whole city seem to fall silent.
“When the ash settles, mia cara, the underworld will know the king of New York finally found his queen.”
Clara’s breath caught.
She did not pull away.
She leaned into his touch, sealing her fate in a world of danger, secrets, and impossible locks.
“Then let’s go steal my father back.”
